BJ, I had in mind the Chinese, Japanese and Korean $$$$ and their big machines and the mentality of working around the clock (3 shifts, instead of just one). They do respect "quiet time" in residential neighbourhoods though, but it's quite common to see them go through the nights for highway construction in the outskirt of the city. In certain locations, especially downtowns of some cities, the only time to do construction work is at night...too much traffic congestion during the day for the big trucks to navigate. They actually poured concrete at 3am for building another hotel next door to a downtown hotel where I stayed.

Yup, chain gang and "Pierre Berton the Last Spike" era are gone.

BTW, the Chinese has built a 1300 km high speed tracks for their bullet trains (top speed 350km/hr, but they have reduced it to 300km/hr) from Beijing to Shanghai. So they must know something about buiding RR with modern equipment.

I would say, get OMERS and their Japanese partner Mitsubish over to the RoF to do our 300km run to Nakina. With their money (they have about $2B/project) and expertise (Mitsubishi is a construction powerhouse) we can probably get it done way before 2015, assuming that there are no major political, social, environmental roadblocks along the way.

Agreed, the bridge is a major task, but the Japanese has built long bridges over large rivers with respectable muddy bottom...lots of mud and much worse than swamp.

goldhunter